The contrast is sharp. “Be not deceived”; do not wander so in your minds
as to think that temptation and sin and death come from God. He is not
the source of evil. Rabbi Chaninah says: “No evil thing cometh down from
above.” Note Jesus in John 8:23 on “above” and “below.” James is
tenderly affectionate in his appeal on this point—“my beloved brethren.”
On the contrary, only good comes from God. God is good, and he alone is
absolutely good (Mark 10:18).[59] In the Greek the next sentence runs
like a hexameter line if one short syllable is considered long by stress
of the meter.[60] We need not tarry over a fanciful straining after
poetical lines in prose. Oesterley agrees with Ewald in seeing here a
quotation from a Hellenistic poem. It is far more likely just accidental
rhythm common enough in good prose. The scholars differ also as to how
to translate the sentence. Moffatt has it: “All we are given is good,
and all our endowments are faultless.”
“The Father of lights” sets God over against the worship of the sun so
common among the ancients. Plato (Repub. vi. 505 ff.) compares the sun
to the idea of the good. Modern science powerfully illustrates this
comparison of James in bringing out what we owe to the sun in the way of
light, heat, and life itself. Philo calls God “the Father of the all,”
the lights (the moon and the stars) and all else in the universe. “When
I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars,
which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and
the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:3 f.). Compare
Philippians 2:15. God is not only light (1 John 1:5), but all true light
comes from him—all the light that lights every man coming into the world
(John 1:9).
But the sun appears to move rapidly. Watch the sun drop like a ball of
fire at sunset and thus cast a deepening shadow over the earth. The
sundial is one of the oldest ways to mark “the shadow that is cast by
turning.” Mayor quotes Plutarch (Percl. 7) for the use of this figure
for shadows cast on the dial. James is here, of course, using popular
language, as we still do when we say that the sun rises and sets. But
with our Father of lights there is “no change of rising and setting”
(Moffatt). He “casts no shadow on the earth.” Even the polestar, we now
know, whirls on in space, carrying the worlds along with it. But our God
is not changeable or whimsical. He does not send now good, now ill. He
knows how to give good gifts to those that ask him, yea, the best of all
gifts, the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:13). What seems ill is really good if it
comes from God. If one takes his stand by God’s side and looks at his
life, he sees God’s plan as a whole for his own life and for God’s
glory.